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The Social Life of Ink by Ted Bishop: Review

A round the world trip discovers the origins around our favourite pens — and why we still use them in a digital age

The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word by Ted Bishop, Viking, 384 pages, $29.95

Ted Bishop, author of The Social Life of Ink.

By Marcia KayeSpecial to the Star

Fri., Nov. 14, 2014

In this digital age, why on earth would we want to read a book about the history of ink?

Because the author is Ted Bishop, that’s why. Bishop may be an academic — he’s a professor of English literature and film studies at the University of Alberta — but he’s also an engaging and witty storyteller. A Governor General’s Award finalist for his 2005 bestseller Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books, about his epic ride on his Ducati Monster from Edmonton to Texas and back, Bishop is set to score again with The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word. Once again combining his two loves — travel and cultural exploration — Bishop makes a pilgrimage to five continents to delve into a substance that, far from being obsolete, is so common many of us barely give it a second thought.

Bishop begins his journey in Budapest, birthplace of Lazlo Bíró, the eccentric journalist who, fed up with messy fountain pens, invented the ballpoint in the 1930s. He then follows the trail to South America, the U.S. and Europe, chasing stories of one intriguing character after another. There’s American schemer Milton Reynolds, who in 1945 promoted the Reynolds Rocket pen with blatantly sexual imagery and saucy ad slogans (“Got a rocket in your pocket?”), and France’s Marcel Bich, who made Bics the first truly disposable pens. Along the way Bishop blows up a linseed oil concoction with a master inkmaker in the Utah desert and discusses the secret ingredient in Gutenberg’s fine 15th-century printing (“just a splash” of Gutenberg’s own urine).

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While Western ink is liquid, Chinese ink is solid. So Bishop heads to Asia to explore inksticks, made of soot and glue and exquisitely embossed. Of course Bishop must take calligraphy lessons, with amusing results. He also heads to Uzbekistan to see an ancient Qur’an written in brown tannin-based ink, the same type Leonardo da Vinci used for drawing, Bach for composing and Shakespeare for playwriting.

The Social Life of Ink is both highly personal and exceedingly relatable. Bishop intersperses accounts of various ink-stained wretches with his own experiences that have nothing to do with ink: meeting his Asian parents-in-law (his wife, Hsing, is Taiwanese), trying to stay sober at a Chinese “business lunch” and overdosing on noxious green tobacco snuff in Samarkand. Literary references abound, from Roland Barthes to T.S. Eliot, Little Red Riding Hood to Virginia Woolf. (He is an English prof, after all.)

Bishop occasionally gets overly caught up in a story. I would have preferred a little less about Bíró and a little more about, say, printer cartridges. But he generally keeps things gliding along using random insights (dare I call them inklings?) such as, “Riding a motorcycle and writing may seem streets apart, but in both you’re out there with naked metal doing the thing itself, absorbed in the flow.” He makes the case that the Internet hasn’t replaced ink; it’s revitalized it. While five years ago half his students had laptops, today 38 out of 40 use pens and notebooks. They say writing helps them remember better.

You don’t have to be a pen nerd to appreciate The Social Life of Ink. But the book did help me see why I bought a calligraphy pen and hand-lettered my wedding invitations, why I have an inordinate number of pens in my computer-desk drawer (78), and why I like to match the ink colour to the task. “Anyone who uses a pen knows that sense of dismay upon finding that you have the wrong colour — a blue too light, a black too grey,” Bishop writes. “A bright blue can make sombre reflections look whiny. You want to write in the margin, ‘This isn’t really me, imagine this in jet black!’”

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